US Championship 1987 — Estes Park

◇Half a point covered the top of the field

Neither champion lost a game and neither won many: three wins and ten draws apiece. Half a point behind them, on 7½, came a four-way tie of John Fedorowicz, Michael Wilder, Yasser Seirawan and Maxim Dlugy, with Boris Gulko a further half point back on 7. Arthur Bisguier, writing it up for the Christian Science Monitor, summarised it simply — only half points divided the top half of the field. Larry Christiansen and Michael Rohde shared eighth on 6½; Dmitry Gurevich finished last on 4.

Benjamin had been runner-up in each of the two preceding championships — 9/13 behind Alburt at Estes Park in 1985, and 9½/15 in the 1986 zonal — and Bisguier observed that his scoring percentage in both of those was better than the one that finally made him champion. De Firmian's route was the opposite: sixteenth and last in 1986, joint first in 1987.

◇The clock in round two

The title turned, in the end, on a time scramble in the second round. De Firmian, playing White against Rohde in a Sicilian, built a virulent attack and reached a winning position, but the complications had left both men with seconds on their clocks before move forty. Rohde, moving instantly, played an illegal capture of the white queen; de Firmian, in Bisguier's telling living up to his nickname Mr. Cool, replied by taking the black king.

The tournament director then noticed that de Firmian's flag had fallen and declared a time forfeit, before consulting the rulebook, penalising the illegal move and restoring a few seconds to White. When Rohde went to replace his move he knocked his own king over so that it sprawled across two squares; de Firmian's flag fell a second time; the referee again gave him more time, and Rohde resigned under protest. The protest was later withdrawn.

Had the forfeit stood, Benjamin would have been sole champion and de Firmian would have fallen six places in the final table.

◇The field around them

Boris Gulko was playing his first US Championship. A Soviet champion in 1977, he had spent seven years as a refusenik, barred from top-level competition after applying to emigrate, and had only reached the United States in 1986; the crosstable lists him with no US rating at all. He finished seventh on 7/13, and would go on to win the championship outright in 1994 and again in 1999 — the only player to have held both the Soviet and the American titles.

Michael Wilder, still an international master, shared third here and took the championship outright the following year at Cambridge Springs. Benjamin's own share of the 1987 title was the first of three: he won it alone in 1997 and shared it again in 2000.